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Andrew Zawacki and Michelle Naka Pierce, Thursday, March 21, 2013

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On Thursday, March 21 at 7:00 p.m. Andrew Zawacki and Michelle Naka Pierce read at Counterpath.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry books Videotape (Counterpath, 2013), Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia). Editor and co-translator from the Slovenian of Aleš Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems (Persea), his translation from the French of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is recently out from Burning Deck. Co-editor of VERSE, he teaches at the University of Georgia.

Born in Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce [video of reading above] is the author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (2012), awarded Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize; She, A Blueprint (2011); Beloved Integer (2007); and TRI/VIA (2003). Pierce is associate professor and director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

 


Richard Vijgen: The Deleted City, Friday, March 22, 2013

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Screen Shot 2013-02-12 at 2.24.04 PMOn Friday, March 22 at 7:00 PM Richard Vijgen, an Amsterdam-based programmer, presented his digital archiving project “The Deleted City” for the first time in the United States.

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For a preview, visit www.deletedcity.net.

During the 1990s—as the Internet became mainstream—Geocities was the world’s third most visited website. It portrayed the Internet as a city and allowed millions of “netizens” to build their first digital home. In 1999, at the peak of the Dot-com era, Geocities was sold, along with its millions of inhabitants, to Yahoo! for 3.5 billion dollars. Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the Internet (such as the social network) had taken over and netizens had moved on to Myspace and Facebook, Geocities was shut down and deleted.

In an heroic effort to preserve ten years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that provides permanent storage and free public access to digital materials, made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650-gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of this interactive excavation of recent online history.

Media Feedback

“Inexplicably quite moving.” —It’s Nice That

“Like an enormous cyberpunk metroplex seen from above. . . . The experience is as if one was peering directly into the preserved homes of 90s netizens captured in time.” —The Creator’s Project

“An interesting way to look back at the early days of digital culture, those that preceded social media.” — Forbes

In the Artist’s Words

Contrary to popular belief, the internet does forget. Geocities was one of the first massive online communities and subsequently one of the first to perish. With the deletion of 35 million home-pages not only did we lose the texts and images they contained, but also the structure, concepts and spirit of the community that created them.

With the shift in metaphors used to describe and understand the internet from the more utopian “digital city” or “global library” used in the 1990′s to the more utilitarian “social network” or “cloud” that are popular today, the homepage gave way to the profile, netizens became users and many of their aesthetic and linguistic experiments were standardised into templates.

The Deleted City aims to revisit the Internet-as-a-city to evaluate how the medium, the values that underpin it and the metaphors that describe it have changed. Looking at these html files (many of them hand-coded) through a contemporary touch screen, you see the early netizens struggling with the medium, trying to find a common language and define the ever under construction homepage as we knew it.

The installation is an interactive visualisation of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.

In full view, the map is a data visualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighbourhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain. While browsing, nearby MIDI files are played.

Ahsahta Press Feature with Janet Holmes, Carrie Olivia Adams, Dan Beachy-Quick, David Mutschlecner, and Kate Greenstreet, Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 7 p.m.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013, at 7:00 PM Counterpath will host an Ahsahta Press feature, with Ahasahta Press publisher Janet Holmes and readings by Ahsahta authors Carrie Olivia Adams, Dan Beachy-Quick, David Mutschlecner, and Kate Greenstreet.

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A not-for-profit literary publisher, Ahsahta was founded in 1974 at Boise State University to preserve the best works by early poets of the American West. Its name, ahsahta, is the Mandan word meaning “Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep,” and was first recorded by members of the Lewis and Clark expedition; the founding editors chose the word to honor the press’s original mission to publish Western poetry. Peggy Pond Church, H.L. Davis, Hazel Hall, Gwendolen Haste, Haniel Long, and Norman Macleod are among the early Western writers Ahsahta Press restored to print.

Soon after its inception, the press began publishing contemporary poetry by Western poets along with its reprint titles. Ahsahta editors discovered and initially published a number of widely popular poets from the West—among them David Baker, Katharine Coles, Wyn Cooper, Gretel Ehrlich, Cynthia Hogue, Leo Romero, and Carolyne Wright. With the inception of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Boise State University, Ahsahta Press expanded its scope, presenting the work of poets from across the nation whose work is selected through national competitions or by general submission.

Through the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing, Ahsahta gives graduate students enrolled in publishing courses the opportunity for hands-on experience in the daily business of a small press, including initial manuscript readings, pre-press production, and marketing tasks. An undergraduate internship is available each semester as well for qualified students.

Janet Holmes is author of five books of poems, most recently The ms of my kin (Shearsman, 2009) and F2F (University of Notre Dame Press). Her work has received the Chad Walsh Prize, the Ernest Sandeen Award, the Minnesota Book Award, the Anhinga Prize, the Pablo Neruda Award, and grants from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, the Loft, the Minnesota Arts Board and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. With an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and a B.A. from Duke University, she teaches poetry writing and form and theory in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. She is director and editor of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry independent press at Boise State University, and has taught at the university since 1999.

Carrie Olivia Adams is a book publicist by day who at night names her poems for drinks at her favorite Windy City cocktail bar. Despite having perfected the art of procrastination through elaborate cooking projects that involve cheese incubators and 5-gallon water baths, she has somehow authored two books of poetry—Intervening Absence and the forthcoming Forty-One Jane Doe’s. She is learning Japanese in the hope of one day becoming a cartoon samurai.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry: Circle’s Apprentice, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine; five chapbooks: Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelesness, Heroisms, Canto, and Mobius Crowns (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy); and a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick: A Whaler’s Dictionary. Reddy and Beachy-Quick’s collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, Conversities, from 1913 Press. Milkweed Editions has also published a new collection of essays, meditations, and tales, Wonderful Investigations. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space, Dear Navigator, and West Branch. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in spring 2010.

David Mutschlecner is author of Esse (Ahsahta, 2013) and a previous collection, Veils (Stride Press, 1999), as well as the chapbook Qualities of Resonance (Paradox Press, 1990). His degrees from Indiana University and St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reflect his continuing interest in Thomistic metaphysics and poetry. He lives in New Mexico and makes his living in the grocery business.

Kate Greenstreet‘s new book Young Tambling is just out from Ahsahta Press. Her previous books are case sensitive and The Last 4 Things, also with Ahsahta. Her poetry can be found in Colorado Review, Boston Review, Volt, Fence, Chicago Review, and other journals.

 

The Ister: A Film by David Barison and Daniel Ross, Friday, April 12, 2013, 6 p.m.

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Screen Shot 2013-03-14 at 4.03.38 PMOn Friday, April 12, 2013, at 6 p.m. Counterpath will present a screening of David Barison and Daniel Ross’s film The Ister.

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At the height of World War Two, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century delivered a series of lectures on a poem about the Danube river, by one of Germany’s greatest poets.

The philosopher was Martin Heidegger, who in 1927 achieved worldwide fame with his magnum opus, Being and Time. Heidegger embraced the National Socialist ‘revolution’ in 1933, becoming rector of Freiburg University. His inaugural address culminated in ‘Heil Hitler!’

After clashing with the Nazi bureaucracy, he resigned the rectorate in 1934. Nine years later, as the tide of the war was turning against Germany, Heidegger spent the summer semester lecturing on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. He focused on a poem about the Danube known as ‘The Ister.’

Sulina, RomaniaRather than an esoteric retreat into the world of poetry, Heidegger’s lectures were a direct confrontation with the political, cultural and military chaos facing Germany and the world in 1942, a time the philosopher characterised in his lectures as “the stellar hour of our commencement.” The poem in question began with the lines:

Now come fire!
Eager are we
To see the day

The film The Ister takes up some of the most challenging paths in Heidegger’s thought, as we journey from the mouth of the Danube river in Romania to its source in the Black Forest. However controversial Heidegger continues to be, his thought remains alive in the work of some of the most remarkable thinkers and artists working today. Four of these conduct our voyage upstream along the Danube: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, and, finally, the filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.

Kelheim, GermanyWinding through the shattered remains of the former Yugoslavia, through a Hungary busily restoring its national mythology, and through a Germany that is both the heart of the new Europe and the ghost of the old one, the Danube itself is the question of the film.

By drawing the places and times of the river into a constellation with Heidegger’s thought, the film invites the viewer to participate in some of the most provocative questions facing Europe and the world today. These questions – of home and place, culture and memory, of technology and ecology, of politics and war – beckon us now as they did Heidegger in 1942.

Jen Hofer on Translation: A Talk and Reading, Saturday, April 13 at 3:00 PM

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1050_jhofe_photoLos Angeles-based award-winning poet and translator Jen Hofer will read from and discuss some of her many translation projects, which include Ivory Black, a bilingual edition of Negro marfil by Myriam Moscona (Les Figues Press, 2011); sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a translation from Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008); and the ground-breaking Sin puertas visibles: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (Ediciones Sin Nombre and University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). There will be ample time for questions and conversation. Free and open to the public.

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Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and literary activism collaborative Antena. Her latest translations include the homemade chapbook En las maravillas/In Wonder (Libros Antena/Antena Books, 2012) and Ivory Black, a translation of Negro marfil by Myriam Moscona (Les Figues Press 2011). Her recent and forthcoming books are available from a range of small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, Dusie Books, Insert Press, Kenning Editions, Litmus Press, Palm Press, and Subpress. She teaches poetics, translation and bookmaking at CalArts and Otis College.

Not I: Collaboration & Constraint & Les Figues Press Feature with Vanessa Place, Teresa Carmody, Michael Du Plessis, Jen Hofer, and Doug Nufer, Saturday, April 13, 2013, 6:30 p.m.

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Join us Saturday, April 13, at 6:30 p.m. for Not I: Collaboration & Constraint and a feature of Les Figues Press, with publishers Vanessa Place and Teresa Carmody, as well as Les Figues authors Michael Du Plessis, Jen Hofer, and Doug Nufer. Les Figues authors and editors discuss “methods for making” and “playing with others.” Performance to follow.

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Les Figues Press creates aesthetic conversations between Writers/Artists and readers, especially those interested in innovative/experimental/avant-garde work. The Press intends in the most premeditated fashion to champion the trinity of Beauty, Belief, and Bawdry.

Les Figues Press publishes TrenchArt, an annual series of new literature that posits literary works in an inter-textual conversation; participating writers and artists write an aesthetic essay or poetics, setting the terms and parameters of the serial conversation. Find excerpts and visual art in our Writers/Artists and Les Figues Books.

Les Figues hosts a multi-author blog – Give A Fig – with rotating guest bloggers, including Les Figues authors, artists and others we admire.

The Press sponsors Mrs. Porter’s 2.0, a women’s art salon and discussion group in which artists working in all media (visual artists, writers, dancers, musicians) share their work and discuss how the presented material fits into a larger artistic and social frame. The Press also sponsors and participates in public readings, workshops and other events.

Les Figues Press was founded in January 2005 by Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, Pam Ore and Sarah LaBorde. In December 2005, Les Figues incorporated as a nonprofit 501c3 organization. The Press is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the California Association of Nonprofits (CAN), and the Green Press Initiative. Les Figues Press titles are distributed by Small Press Distribution (SPD).

Vanessa Place received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an M.F.A. from Antioch University, and a J.D. from Boston University. Her books of poetry and conceptual writing include Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues, 2006), a 50,000-word, one-sentence novel in verse; La Medusa (2008); and Statement of Facts (2010), the first volume of her trilogy Tragodía which repurposes legal prosecution and defense documents verbatim; among others. With Robert Fitterman, she co-wrote Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), an exploration of contemporary conceptual writers and their work. She is also the author of The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law (Other Press, 2010), an analysis of the prosecution of sexual offenders. In addition to her work as an appellate criminal defense attorney, she serves as co-director of Les Figues Press. Place currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Teresa Carmody’s recent work includes Explanation as Composition, a collaborative audio project with Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Kate Durbin, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. She is the author of the short story collection Requiem and two chapbooks: Eye Hole Adore and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne. She is the co-founding director of Les Figues Press and is currently teaching at California Institute for the Arts.

Doug Nufer uses formal constraints to write fiction, poetry, and pieces for performance. He is the author of the poetry collection We Were Werewolves (Make Now, 2008), and six novels, including Never Again (Black Square, 2004), Negativeland (Autonomedia, 2004), and the double novel The Mudflat Man/The River Boys (Soultheft Records, 2006). His work has appeared in Chain, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, ubu.com and trickhouse.org. He lives in Seattle.

Michael Du Plessis teaches Comparative Literature and English at the University of Southern California, where he is also completing a masters degree in Professional Writing. His novel, The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker, is forthcoming from Les Figues Press. He has written about a wide variety of subjects, from Goth culture to the French fin-de-siècle and has also performed, amongst other venues, at Highways and at the MAK Center/Schindler House.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and literary activism collaborative Antena. Her latest translations include the homemade chapbook En las maravillas/In Wonder (Libros Antena/Antena Books, 2012) and Ivory Black, a translation of Negro marfil by Myriam Moscona (Les Figues Press 2011). Her recent and forthcoming books are available from a range of small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, Dusie Books, Insert Press, Kenning Editions, Litmus Press, Palm Press, and Subpress. She teaches poetics, translation and bookmaking at CalArts and Otis College.

 

Suzanne Doppelt: Photography, Friday, April 19, 2013, 7 p.m.

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doppeltJoin us Friday, April 19, 2013, at 7 p.m. for the opening of an exhibition of photography by Suzanne Doppelt. Work will be on display through mid-May.

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Suzanne Doppelt has collaborated with various other artists and writers, including Georges Aperghis, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Anne Portugal. Director of the “Cabinet of Curiosities” series for the Parisian publisher Bayard and poetry editor for the cultural review Vacarme, she has held residencies with Inventaire-Invention, the Fondation Royaumont, and various other cultural institutions, and her photography has been in solo and group shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Le Centre Culturel of Bastia, L’Institut Français of Naples, Le Pavillon des Arts, L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nîmes,  New York University, the Cabinet d’Art Graphique of the Louvre, and the Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris. She is the author of The Field Is Lethal (Counterpath 2010), translated by Cole Swensen.

Evelyn Reilley and Ronaldo Wilson, Saturday, April 20, 2013, 7 p.m.

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reilly_styrofoamSaturday, April 20, 2013, at 7 p.m. Counterpath will host a reading by Evelyn Reilley and Ronaldo Wilson.

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Evelyn Reilly lives and writes in New York City. She is the author of Apocalypso (Roof Books, 2012) and Styrofoam (also published by Roof Books), Hiatus, from Barrow Street Press, and Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, from Portable Press at YoYo Labs.

Ronaldo Wilson earned an AB at the University of California-Berkeley, an MA at New York University, and a PhD at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Wilson is the author of the collections Poems of the Black Object (2009), which won the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award, and Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (2008). His poetry has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, and he has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Kundiman, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Anderson Center for the Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. With poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Duriel E. Harris, Wilson cofounded the performance-based Black Took Collective.


Christophe Wall-Romana on Cinepoetry, Tuesday, April 23, 7 p.m.

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wall-romanaOn Tuesday, April 23, 2013, at 7 p.m. Christophe Wall-Romana will give a talk on Cinepoetry and his new book, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry.

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Cinepoetry analyzes how French poets have remapped poetry through the lens of cinema for more than a century. In showing how poets have drawn on mass culture, technology, and material images to incorporate the idea, technique, and experience of cinema into writing, Wall-Romana documents the long history of cross-media concepts and practices often thought to emerge with the digital.

In showing the cinematic consciousness of Mallarmé and Breton and calling for a reappraisal of the influential poetry theory of the early filmmaker Jean Epstein, Cinepoetry reevaluates the bases of literary modernism. The book also explores the crucial link between trauma and trans-medium experiments in the wake of two world wars and highlights the marginal identity of cinepoets who were often Jewish, gay, foreign-born, or on the margins.

What results is a broad rethinking of the relationship between film and literature. The episteme of cinema, the book demonstates, reached the very core of its supposedly highbrow rival, while at the same time modern poetry cultivated the technocultural savvy that is found today in slams, e-poetry, and poetic-digital hybrids.

Christophe Wall-Romana is Associate Professor of French at the University of Minnesota.

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Worm Work: A Talk with Janelle Schwartz, Saturday, March 23, 2013

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janelleschwartzOn Saturday, March 23 at 7:30 p.m. Janelle Schwartz gave a talk based on her book Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism.

“I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.” —Victor Frankenstein

Worms. Nature is riddled with them. Literature is crawling with them. And yet despite—or because of—their pervasive form, the worm often provokes an immediate discomfort and unconscious distancing: it is us against them. From the tapeworm to the leech, the maggot to the earthworm, there is always already something muddled or dirty, offensive even, when talking about worms.

Rehabilitating the so-called humble or lowly worm into a powerful aesthetic trope, Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism, proposes a new framework for understanding the worm’s strangely animate nature. This book traces a pattern of cultural production, a vermiCulture constructed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and on into today, that is as transformative of matter as it is of mind. The upcoming presentation by Worm Work’s author, Dr. Janelle A. Schwartz, promises a lively discussion of all things worm and literature—with a good measure of pop culture thrown in! Her talk will feature a brief introduction to the ideas of “worm work” and “vermiCulture,” and will go on to enumerate some dynamic examples readily found in the literature of the Romantic Age. Her talk will close with an interactive reading, a wormy discussion between author and audience concerning the worm work in a poem by William Blake and a Punch cartoon or two featuring Charles Darwin. She hopes, in the end, to convince you that worms are truly good to think with.

Janelle A. Schwartz received both her master’s degree in comparative literature and her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published articles, essays and blogs on literature and ecology, cabinets of curiosity and pedagogy. Her poetry has been published in The Arkansas Review and in an anthology dedicated to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Schwartz is the co-editor of Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study. She is also the author of Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism (2012, University of Minnesota Press), which focuses on the intersection of invertebrate zoology during the 18th and 19th centuries with the poetry and prose of Romanticism. The direction of Schwartz’s next research project involves literary polar landscapes, and she is currently at work on her first travel narrative.

Worm Work is sophisticated and full of unexpected analytic insights. Animal studies have in general been preoccupied by big animals and the nineteenth century, so it is important and refreshing to go a little further back in time and down the great chain of being to see how the lower animals have shaped, and been shaped by, cultural standards.
—Charlotte Sleigh, author of Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology

A good, comprehensive study of the burgeoning field of Romantic literature and science, which will be useful to those working within this area. . . I will certainly take more notice of worms from now on.
—Times Higher Education

Catherine Taylor and Mathias Svalina, Tuesday, April 2, 2013

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ApartOn Tuesday, April 2, 2013, at 7 p.m. Catherine Taylor and Mathias Svalina read at Counterpath.

Taylor read from her new book Apart, which grew out of Taylor’s memories of visiting her family in South Africa as a child and her later curiosity about her (white) mother’s involvement in early anti-apartheid women’s groups. Mixing narrative prose, poems, social and political theory, and found texts culled from years of visiting South African archives and libraries, Apart navigates the difficult landscapes of history, shame, privilege, and grief.

Mathias Svalina read as well.

“Documentary poetics can break your heart, and Catherine Taylor’s first book of poems, Apart, certainly will…”

Sarah Barber, in The Literary Review

“Catherine Taylor’s Apart offers an intimate and sweeping look at the legacy of apartheid, while performing an altogether rare balance of “lyric seduction” against “the ugliness of corpses.” Taylor refreshingly treats white guilt and the self-conscious recognition of privilege as starting points rather than conclusions, as she plumbs the depths of history, from which, as she reminds us, “no one is excused.” The result is edifying, original, and critically rigorous — a poetic and political vibration between “ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.”

Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty

“Catherine Taylor’s Apart is neither journalism nor memoir nor documentary poem nor lyric essay nor jeremiad—though it contains elements of them all—but a brilliant and relentless examination of conscience always in search of a literary form adequate to its mission. Embarked on the “search for a common name” in the aftermath of South African Apartheid, Taylor’s takes care on her way to gather an archive of feelings, “signs of struggle, boredom, hope, effort, fatigue, tedium, privilege, its lack, brutality, tyranny, complicity, despair, and resistance.” If Apart renders in language the affect of having an ethics, what makes Taylor’s writing ultimately so persuasive as a politics is its portrait of the private citizen as “at once ineffectual and humane, complicit and resistant, irrelevant and necessary.” Deeply attentive to the contradictory ideologies that structure our lives as historical subjects, Taylor’s vision of conscientious citizenship demands that we recognize subjectivity’s intrinsic subjection to power without ever losing sight of our individual agency and the necessity for independent action and inquiry. Thinking its way through the insidious, tragic inequalities of globalization, capitalism, and democracy’s alleged freedoms, Apart indeed succeeds in persuading its readers to disavow “a cynicism we can’t afford.”

—Brian Teare

“Everything begins as duality (the personal and the historical, ideas of white and ideas of black), and becomes more—even hopelessly—complex…It is not so much that everything is dual, but as Taylor eventually notes, a “jammed hinge.” Everything remains, as the title has it, apart. In exploring the unresolvable, everything becomes a part.”

–Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Ploughshares

“The pendulum image, from the prologue to Catherine Taylor’s  Apart,  could swing neatly between ‘prose and verse’ or between ‘faith and doubt, black and white, change and stasis, self and other, amnesty and retribution .  .  . poverty and wealth .  .  . alien and citizen’ in a book that investigates the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. Instead, in a hybrid work that fuses the lyric, the documentary, and the memoir genres with Taylor’s scholarly inquisition, Taylor tells us that the pendulum system ‘doesn’t just swing back and forth .  .  . inscribing simple opposites’ but that ‘it leaves a trail of ever-shifting ellipses.’”

–Pia Aliperti, NewPages

from Apart:

Fear has a tailwind. Fear colonizes quickly. Fear is calculating red lights and bystanders and petrol levels even now as I write you this letter upside down under the Southern Cross.

* * *

bad family’s a cancer or a cause, celebration’s inevitable denial flaunts misdeeds and even evil cleans its teeth in the mirror of not me, not my people.

Michael Heller and Amy Catanzano, Friday, April 5, 2013

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On Friday, April 5, 2013, at 7 p.m., Counterpath hosts Michael Heller and Amy Catanzano.

Michael Heller gave a reading and play an excerpt or two from his multimedia collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson, who has created video, music, and text pieces from his work. Amy Catanzano will read from her work.

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Michael Heller is a poet, essayist, and critic. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami Beach, he was educated as an engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. While working as a technical writer for Sperry Gyroscope, he met several former students of Louis Zukofsky, who introduced him to the work of a wide range of contemporary poets. His poems first appeared in print in the nineteen sixties while he was living in a small village on Spain’s Andalusian coast.  In 1967, after returning to the United States, he took a position at New York University.  Since then, he has written more than 20 books, including Accidental Center (1972), In The Builded Place (1979), Wordflow (1997), Exigent Futures (2003), Living Root: A Memoir (2000) and the prize-winning collection of essays, Conviction’s Net of Branches (1985).  Among his most recent works are a volume of poems, Eschaton (2009), a mixed genre work, Beckmann Variations & other poems (2010) and Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008, expanded edition, 2012). His writings on contemporary poetry, Judaic thought and on the intersections of Buddhist and Western philosophy and practice have appeared in various essay collections and journals.  Among his many awards are grants and prizes from the Nation Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America and The Fund for Poetry. He resides in New York City and summers in Colorado.

Amy Catanzano is the author of Multiversal (Fordham University Press), recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry, iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Editions), and the forthcoming Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella, recipient of the 2012 Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction. She currently teaches poetry and fiction writing in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Chatham University and will be teaching in Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program in 2013.

Glitch Aesthetic Exhibition, Saturday, April 6, through Saturday, April 13, 2013

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glitchOpening Saturday, April 6, and on display through Saturday, April 13, Glitch work by six international digital artists, including Kim Asendorf , Giselle Beiguelman, Maneul Fernandez, Rosa Menkman, Jimmy Joe Roche, and Rick Silva.

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The glitch aesthetic is an aesthetic of error. The distortion of visual and audio data by the machines meant to present this data clearly is the basis of glitch. Feedback, pixelation, color distortions, and static mark the works presented in this exhibit. Yet despite the often unappealing effect of glitching in our daily interactions with computers, cell phones, and televisions, these artists have found that the seemingly random alterations made by distortion can render banal imagery beautiful, make beautiful imagery strange.  With a wide variety of techniques, from modifying analogue equipment to intentionally produce glitched images to using 3-D composition and rendering software to produce realistic-yet-impossible environments, these glitch artists are engaging with technology to question its role in how we see and hear the world.

Kim Asendorf is a conceptual artist and works in the large area of media and digital related art. He loves to transport things from the Internet into real life and back. Kim has done several net art projects, often based on data taken from the Internet or gathered from individuals. He experiments with generative strategies, physical computing, data, and glitch. Most of his works become installations, sculptures, visualizations and abstract geometric art, but some turn into applications, animated gifs, or noisy sounds. In 2010 he coined the term “pixel sorting,” an algorithmic image manipulation process with unique results. Born in 1981 in Achim, near Bremen. Trained as an industrial electrician in 1999 at Daimler. Studied four semesters of computer science at Technical University of Bremen. From 2006 to 2011 he studied at the School of Art and Design Kassel with a focus on Media & Social Hacking, Net.art & New Media Art and Creative Coding. Kim lives and works in Berlin.

Giselle Beiguelman is a new media artist, curator and researcher. She teaches Art History and Design at the Architecture and Urbanism Faculty of the University of São Paulo. Her art work has been presented in international venues such as Net_Condition (ZKM, Karlsruhe), el final del eclipse (Fundación Telefonica, Madrid), The 25th São Paulo Biennial, Algorithmic Revolution (ZKM), 3rd Sevilla Biennial, Transitio_MX (Mexico), YOU_ser (ZKM), Geografías Celulares (Fundacion Telefonica, Buenos Aires and Lima), artemov (Belo Horizonte and São Paulo) and Visual Foreign Correspondents (Berlin), among others. She was the curator of Nokia Trends (2007 and 2008), of the Brazilian participation in ISEA Ruhr (2009) and of the online festivals HTTPvideo (2008 and 2010) and HTTPpix (2010). Artistic Director of Sergio Motta Institute (2008-2011), she was Professor of the graduate program in Communication and Semiotics of PUC-SP (São Paulo, 2001-2011). Editor of seLecT magazine and curator of Tecnofagias (3rd 3M Digital Art Show, Instituto Tomie Othake, Aug. 13–Sep. 15 2012).

Manuel Fernández is a Spanish artist based in Madrid. His artistic practice begins at the intersection of art, popular culture and the Internet. He works with a wide range of media including: painting, website, animated .gif, installation, photography, video and print. His notable pieces include QR Calligraphy, Two Hundred and Sixteen Colors, On Kawara Time Machine, Ants, and most recently Broken Gradients.

Fernández has several works at the Artbase of Rhizome at the New Museum NYC and has been exhibited in the Americas, Europe and Asia, including The Museum of Moving Image, New York, Art Basel Miami Beach, Bronx Art Space, New York, The Photographers Gallery, London, The White House Studio Project, Toronto, Shangai Art Museum and the Triennale di Milano.

Manuel has received numerous awards for his work, including Carmen Arozena Prize, Madrid, Projecte Capella Intervention Prize, Palma de Mallorca, and Castellón Expanded Painting Prize.

Fernández is founder and curator of Domain Gallery, a web-based gallery focused on digital and Internet-based works. His work has been featured in multiple outlets, including Spanish newspaper El País, trend magazine Notodo, Triangulation Blog and Minus Space Blog, and New York, among others.

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist/theorist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in both analogue and digital media. By combining both her practical as well as her academic background, Menkman merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory of artifacts (a glitch studies). Besides the creation of a formal “Vernacular of File Formats”, within her static work, she also creates work in her Acousmatic Videoscapes. In these Videoscapes she strives to connect both sound and video artifacts conceptually, technically and sometimes narratively.

In 2011 Rosa wrote The Glitch Moment/um, a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts (published by the Institute of Network Cultures), organized the GLI.TC/H festivals in both Chicago and Amsterdam and co-curated the Aesthetics symposium of Transmediale 2012. Besides this, Rosa Menkman is pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths, London under the supervision of Matthew Fuller and Geert Lovink.

Jimmy Joe Roche is an American visual artist residing in Baltimore, MD. Roche is a member of the arts collective Wham City. His videos have screened internationally in venues including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Incubate Arts festival in Holland and Rojo@Nova 2010 in Brazil. In 2008 Roche had his first solo exhibition at Rare Gallery in New York. 2010 marked his second solo exhibition in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and in January 2011, he opened his third solo exhibition, Under Pressure, at Rare Gallery. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Beautiful Decay, The New Museum’s Younger than Jesus artist directory, 100, a new book by Francesca Gavin published in 2011, and a feature article in the November 2011 issue of the Spanish art magazine BELIO. Roche is a recipient of the 2012 new work residency at \\ Harvestworks // in NYC and is preparing for a two-man show with fellow artist Nathaniel Mellor at the Baltimore Museum of Art in the summer of 2013.

Rick Silva’s art has shown in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including Transmediale (Germany), Futuresonic (U.K.), and Sonar (Spain). His research has been supported through grants and commissions from organizations such as Rhizome and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He has performed live multimedia works in London at E:VENT Gallery, Tokyo at The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, and throughout North America including the Software Cinema Festival in Houston Texas. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and CBS Evening News have all featured his art. Recently, the author of the book Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves regarded him as “a recognized pioneer in New Media Art.” Rick is an Assistant Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Oregon. He has previously taught at the University of Georgia and the Alberta College of Art + Design.

 

Kit Robinson, Friday, April 26 at 7:00 PM

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KitRobinsonOn Friday, April 26 at 7:00 PM Counterpath will host a reading by Kit Robinson.

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Kit Robinson is the author of DETERMINATION (Cuneiform Press, 2010), TRAIN I RIDE (BookThug, 2009), THE MESSIANIC TREES: SELECTED POEMS, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2008), THE CRAVE (Atelos, 2002) and 16 other books of poetry. A co-author of THE GRAND PIANO: AN EXPERIMENT IN COLLECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, SAN FRANCISCO, 1975-1980 (Mode A, 2006-2010), Robinson lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahia Son.


David Ford: A Neighborly Gaze: Reflections on Dark Matter, Friday, May 10 at 7 PM

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David Ford ArtMAY 10 – JUNE 10, 2013
Opening reception: Friday, May 10, 7 PM at Counterpath

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Counterpath is pleased to present the solo exhibition by artist David Ford on view at 613 22nd Street.

In his first solo exhibition at Counterpath, David Ford presents recent work that explores the gaze of one culture into another, one human onto the bridge of faith, class, character or continent, which often divide, even as the backyard fence is pierced by social media and comparatively easy interface.

Shadows of philosophy and incongruous intentions are laced throughout these works, hoping for lingering possibilities as in an unforeseen synchronicity of Islam and Vodun. David Ford has experienced these over the past year by following a decade in which he traces the African diaspora at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.

Ford examines the footprint of his culture, as he rectifies the incongruities of his familial participation. Having relatives fight on both sides of the Civil War, including the battle of New Orleans, invites consideration of social and political decision-making as our society continues to confront its difficult past and complex future. This exhibition will present works in both 2- and 3-D often alluding to its counterpoint dimensionally.

A self-taught artist, Ford has been exploring the painterly in everyday contexts for over 25 years, incorporating diverse ideas of beauty culled from his travels in non-European societies and a discordant, political humor. Ford’s deliberately rough technique and visually ornate imagery lends a folkloric air to compositions and collages of deities and corporate logos, dreamy landscapes and catch phrases that implicate the viewer in a collective search for meaning. His work is shown nationally and internationally, with solo shows in Kansas City, MO, Mexico, and New York City. Ford has received awards from The Charlotte Street Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. His work is included in such collections as The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museo Na-Bolom in Chiapas, Mexico.

Mark Irwin, Elizabeth Robinson, and Christopher Kondrich, Tuesday, May 21 at 7 PM

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IrwinRobinsonKondrichReadingOn Tuesday, May 21 at 7 PM Counterpath will host an evening of readings by Mark Irwin, Elizabeth Robinson, and Christopher Kondrich.

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Mark Irwin was born in Faribault, Minnesota, and has taught at Case Western Reserve, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado/Boulder, the University of Nevada, and Colorado College. The author of seven collections of poetry, The Halo of Desire (1987), Against the Meanwhile, Wesleyan University Press (1989), Quick, Now, Always, BOA (1996), White City, BOA (2000), Bright Hunger, BOA (2004), and Tall If, New Issues (2008), he has won The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado, and Los Angeles, where he teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several books of poetry, including COUNTERPART (Ahsahta Press, 2012), THREE NOVELS (Omnidawn, 2011), ALSO KNOW AS (Apogee Press, 2009), THE ORPHAN & ITS RELATIONS (Fence Books, 2008), INAUDIBLE TRUMPETERS (Harbor Mountain Press, 2008), UNDER THAT SILKY ROOF (Burning Deck Press, 2006), and APPREHEND, the 2003 winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize. She has also received grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Boomerang Foundation. Educated at Bard College, Brown University, and the Pacific School of Religion, Robinson has most recently served as the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal, a New Measure Poetry Prize finalist, which was recently published in the Free Verse Editions poetry series by Parlor Press. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals including American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Free Verse, Guernica, Meridian, Seneca Review, Verse Daily and Washington Square, while his reviews on contemporary poetry have appeared in Colorado Review, CutBank, Jacket2 and Rain Taxi. A recent winner of The Paris-American Reading Series Contest, he is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver where he is an editor for Denver Quarterly.

Ahsahta Press Feature with Janet Holmes, Carrie Olivia Adams, Kate Greenstreet, Dan Beachy-Quick, and David Mutschlecner, Wednesday, April 10, 2013

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013, at 7:00 PM Counterpath hosted an Ahsahta Press feature, with Ahasahta Press publisher Janet Holmes and readings by Ahsahta authors Carrie Olivia Adams, Dan Beachy-Quick, David Mutschlecner, and Kate Greenstreet.

A not-for-profit literary publisher, Ahsahta was founded in 1974 at Boise State University to preserve the best works by early poets of the American West. Its name, ahsahta, is the Mandan word meaning “Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep,” and was first recorded by members of the Lewis and Clark expedition; the founding editors chose the word to honor the press’s original mission to publish Western poetry. Peggy Pond Church, H.L. Davis, Hazel Hall, Gwendolen Haste, Haniel Long, and Norman Macleod are among the early Western writers Ahsahta Press restored to print.

Soon after its inception, the press began publishing contemporary poetry by Western poets along with its reprint titles. Ahsahta editors discovered and initially published a number of widely popular poets from the West—among them David Baker, Katharine Coles, Wyn Cooper, Gretel Ehrlich, Cynthia Hogue, Leo Romero, and Carolyne Wright. With the inception of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Boise State University, Ahsahta Press expanded its scope, presenting the work of poets from across the nation whose work is selected through national competitions or by general submission.

Through the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing, Ahsahta gives graduate students enrolled in publishing courses the opportunity for hands-on experience in the daily business of a small press, including initial manuscript readings, pre-press production, and marketing tasks. An undergraduate internship is available each semester as well for qualified students.

Janet Holmes is author of five books of poems, most recently The ms of my kin (Shearsman, 2009) and F2F (University of Notre Dame Press). Her work has received the Chad Walsh Prize, the Ernest Sandeen Award, the Minnesota Book Award, the Anhinga Prize, the Pablo Neruda Award, and grants from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, the Loft, the Minnesota Arts Board and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. With an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and a B.A. from Duke University, she teaches poetry writing and form and theory in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. She is director and editor of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry independent press at Boise State University, and has taught at the university since 1999.

Carrie Olivia Adams is a book publicist by day who at night names her poems for drinks at her favorite Windy City cocktail bar. Despite having perfected the art of procrastination through elaborate cooking projects that involve cheese incubators and 5-gallon water baths, she has somehow authored two books of poetry—Intervening Absence and the forthcoming Forty-One Jane Doe’s. She is learning Japanese in the hope of one day becoming a cartoon samurai.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry: Circle’s Apprentice, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine; five chapbooks: Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelesness, Heroisms, Canto, and Mobius Crowns (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy); and a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick: A Whaler’s Dictionary. Reddy and Beachy-Quick’s collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, Conversities, from 1913 Press. Milkweed Editions has also published a new collection of essays, meditations, and tales, Wonderful Investigations. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space, Dear Navigator, and West Branch. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in spring 2010.

David Mutschlecner is author of Esse (Ahsahta, 2013) and a previous collection, Veils (Stride Press, 1999), as well as the chapbook Qualities of Resonance (Paradox Press, 1990). His degrees from Indiana University and St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reflect his continuing interest in Thomistic metaphysics and poetry. He lives in New Mexico and makes his living in the grocery business.

Kate Greenstreet‘s new book Young Tambling is just out from Ahsahta Press. Her previous books are case sensitive and The Last 4 Things, also with Ahsahta. Her poetry can be found in Colorado Review, Boston Review, Volt, Fence, Chicago Review, and other journals.

 

Octopus Books Presents Jackie Clark, Amy Lawless, Danielle Pafunda, & JA Tyler, Sunday, April 28 at 4 PM

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octopus books logoOn Sunday, April 28 at 4:00 PM Counterpath will host: Octopus Books Presents Jackie Clark, Amy Lawless, Danielle Pafunda, & JA Tyler.

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Jackie Clark is the series editor of Poets off Poetry & Song of the Week for Coldfront Magazine. She is the recipient of a 2012 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry & is the author of three chapbooks: Office Work from Greying Ghost Press, Red Fortress from H_NGM_N, & I Live Here Now from Lame House Press. Jackie, a 48-mile (77.1 km) ship canal in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) to the Pacific Ocean, lives in Jersey City & can be found online at nohelpforthat.com.  Her first book of poems, Aphoria, was recently published by Brooklyn Arts Press.

Amy Lawless is the author of two collections of poetry: My Dead from Octopus Books & Noctis Licentia from Black Maze Books. She received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2011. Poems are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2013 & The Bakery. The earliest mention of Amy Lawless dates to 1534, when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor & King of Spain, ordered a survey for a route through the Americas that would ease the voyage for ships traveling between Spain & Peru. Some recent prose has appeared in Delirious Hem, HTML Giant, & BOMB Magazine.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of Manhater (Dusie Press Books), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press), My Zorba (Bloof Books), and Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press). A fifth collection Natural History Rape Museum is forthcoming from Bloof Books. Her manuscript The Dead Girls Speak in Unison has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), Best American Poetry (Scribner 2004, 2006, & 2007), Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Press), and Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child Rearing (Fence Books). Her poems, essays, and short stories appear in American Poet, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Kenyon Review, The Huffington Post, and the like. Danielle blogs for Montevidayo, and is an editor for the online journal Coconut.

J. A. Tyler‘s work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry, Black Warrior, Diagram, New York Tyrant, Cream City, & others. Colony Collapse, a poetic psalm to brotherhood & secrecy, is now available from Lazy Fascist Press. His first non-hybrid novel The Zoo, a Going will be released from Dzanc Books in fall 2013. Thus, the total length of J.A. Tyler is 48 mi (77.1 km). He lives in Fort Collins where he runs Mud Luscious Press.

where the glaciers end: A reading with Joanna Ruocco, J. A. Tyler, and Selah Saterstrom, Saturday, May 25 at 7 PM

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Ruocco Tyler Saterstrom EventOn Saturday, May 25 at 7 PM Counterpath will host where the glaciers end: A reading with Joanna Ruocco, J. A. Tyler, and Selah Saterstrom.

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Joanna Ruocco co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, with Brian Conn. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press), and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2). She is a recent recipient of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2.

J. A. Tyler is the author of the poetry collection Variations of a Brother War, the collaborative novel No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, co-authored with John Dermot Woods, and Colony Collapse, a poetic psalm newly available from Lazy Fascist Press. He lives in Fort Collins, where he runs Mud Luscious Press.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press / 2004) and The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press / 2007). She is on faculty in the University of Denver’s graduate creative writing program and in the Naropa Summer Writing Program.

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